Ben Birk » Harrisburg

Adriana Sky/Knotfal

Ben Birk — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:56:57 +0000

Neil Palumbo is a local photographer/friend that lives in my neighborhood. He has been following the band Adriana Sky (formally Knotfal) around for over a year now and asked me if I would be interested in shooting the band at a local bar in Harrisburg. I had never shot a band before and in the past I would have been turned off to the idea. I had not been shooting in quite some time though, so getting out to shoot anything was a warm welcomed idea. We meet up around 7:30pm and made the 30 min drive north. Here is what followed.

-Meet up at Sandwich Man for a hoggie and beer

-Good artwork all around the shop

-Dan the drummer

-Joe the Bassist

-Marty the Vocals

-Mark the Guitarist

-Went back to the bar and they started to play

-Mark and Joe

-Marty standing out

-Dan can play well while posing it up for the camera

-Joe sang a Green Day song

-The crowd got involved

-Mark looking like a shark

-Group shot to end out the night

I had a great time the whole night, the band was really nice, and it was fun to shoot something different. The whole night was shot at 3200 ISO with a shutter speed of between 1/30th to 1/60th at f/2.8. These are settings my camera never sees. Speaking of cameras I shot that night with the Canon EOS-1D Mark III and used the Canon Fisheye EF 15mm f/2.8 and the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. I loved being able to shoot at f/2.8 in the low light with the added benefit of separating my subjects from the sometimes crazy background. In this case I think the gear would make or break a shoot. It would have been nice to edit the images in LR 3 to get rid of all of the noise from shooting at a high ISO, but I think LR 2.7 did a fair job.

Summer Skating

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:02:08 +0000

I have a lot of photos that I need to post up here on the blog. So I’m starting with the oldest and working my way forwards. First on the list is skating shots from early summer that never got posted.

Pennsylvania Skateboarding

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:08:06 +0000

Now that it’s summer and I don’t have a job I have been skateboarding quite a bit and have been getting better in the last 2 months then I have in the past 5 years. My total bag of tricks is as follows Ollie, Ollie off objects (I count that as a tick in my book), Heel Flip, Frontside Shove it, Frontside 180, and Backside Boardslide. The main reason for my success is the PIRATE skateboard I have been riding thanks to Alex.

I also got to shoot some skateboarding the other week with Doug Usko at Mop Top. Matt Roberge tall ass came down with some friends to ride and film that weekend also and the footage will be in an edit soon.

Summer has been good so far and hopefully I will have some more time spent skating and shooting. The last two weeks have been dull as hell.

Shooting Up

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:46:05 +0000

After two weeks I finally got all my film onto my computer and online. I am really stoked on how it turned out, and glad to see I might really understand a thing or two about photography. Sunday I shot with some of the Pirate Skateboard crew in and around Harrisburg, and got some half decent shots that I’ll post on here. I probably didn’t work as hard as I could have but I wanted to make sure I could still shoot a photo, seeing as I have not shot in a little over two months. Damn summer.

Anyways here are the photos, enjoy!